


who am i, darling, to you

by antithestral



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU, DCU (Comics), Green Lantern - All Media Types
Genre: Accidental Marriage, Fluff and Angst, Idiots in Love, M/M, Mutual Pining, Violent Pining, can you BELIEVE this is a tag, just so hot and so SO stupid wow, they’re FATALLY stupid
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-22
Updated: 2019-07-31
Packaged: 2020-07-11 16:08:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19930807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/antithestral/pseuds/antithestral
Summary: Some rules are made to be broken.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> haha wjat is this

When Hal had first started at Ferris Air, he had almost asked out Marissa from Payroll. 

It had his first week on the job, and they had been talking at her cubicle, Hal propped up against the divider, Marissa lounging back in her chair. He had made some

kind of stupid joke and Marissa had tipped her head back in a brief, spectacular-looking laugh, cheeks flushed pink, and it had clicked for him, that ineffable blend of appreciation and desire. He had thought, _‘Yeah, alright,’_ opened to his mouth to say something flawlessly smooth, like, _‘How do you feel about Italian?’_ and his phone chose that precise moment to buzz. 

“Hey, Carol.”

“My office. Now.”

Three words, and she hung up on him. That seemed… promising. 

So Hal had made his excuses and trudged up, and spent thirty minutes getting his ass chewed out for the way he filed his reports. Like the Air Force all over again, except maybe with a better view. 

“One last thing, Hal,” Carol had said, just as he’d started to stand up. “The employment contract you signed last week--you should take a better look at it. Ferris Air has a very strict no-fraternization policy for the workplace.”

Hal had paused, in that awkward lurch between sitting and standing. “You _enforce_ that?” he had asked, in genuine surprise, and received a fairly decisive nod. 

“Stringently.”

“And that doesn't feel a little… regressive to you.”

Carol had allowed a brief, sardonic smile, and said, “Six million people in Coast City, who _don't_ work for Ferris Air. If my employees want to find true love, their dating pool has been skimmed by a fraction of a percentage.”

“Okay, but that's not why.”

She sighed. “There have been lawsuits, in the past. Suffice to say, I'd rather my managers were strongly incentivized to not fuck their secretaries.”

“Is that really an issue?”

“God, you don't even know. Having someone at their beck and call eight hours a day makes them all go completely cro-magnon, it's pathetic.”

“Wait, what about Leo and Annika in R&D? They're married, aren't they?”

Carol made a face. “Can't legislate against marriage. I think it's unconstitutional.”

“Kind of a big loophole, isn't it?”

“Oh yeah, massive.” She smirked. “If you _really_ wanted to ask Marissa out, you _could_ always turn up with a ring.”

Hal gaped at her in mock horror. He didn't think about the ring box in his sock drawer, the one he’d never--Well. It didn't matter now. “You know you're awful, yes?”

“It's my best quality,” Carol had replied, lightly tossing her hair, and they'd both remembered that the best part of their relationship had always been the friendship, and that had been that.

It was that conversation he was thinking about now. 

Bruce had called him into his quarters at the Hall after a League meeting. The Watchtower was nearly complete, barring a few environmental calibrations, and the bylaws had been updated to reflect the League’s increased roster and commitments. 

Silently, he had dropped a sheaf of papers on the desk, with tabs at neat intervals, gestured to an empty chair and then taken his seat on the opposite side, in front of an open laptop, a notepad with the Wayne Enterprises logo on the letterhead beside it. 

The paperwork had already been opened to the first tab. At the bottom, Hal could see space for a signature. 

“Okay, quick question,” Hal asked, “but what the hell is the point of getting anyone’s signature on this thing? I don't think the Hague is going to deem this stuff legally enforceable, Bats.”

Bruce looked up from the laptop he had been glaring at, to glare instead at Hal. “Members of the League strike you as the sort of people to renege on their word, do they?”

“I don't know, you're the master strategist who decided to let _John Constantine_ in, you tell me.”

“Constantine is an _asset._ ” Bruce sounded like he was gritting his teeth, but what else was new. 

“Also a raging dickwipe,” Hal pointed out dickishly.

“If being a 'raging dickwipe' was a _genuine_ barrier against getting into the League, I wouldn't be stuck having this conversation with _you_.”

Hal clasped his hands to his chest. “How you wound me, Die Fledermaus.” After a pause, rifling through the contract, he said, “So this is an honor thing.”

“Yes.”

Hal sat back. “Fair enough.”

And then he flipped the contract back to the first page, and started to read. 

  
  


Six minutes into the read, he hit the fraternization clause. 

“You're kidding me,” Hal muttered out loud. 

“Unlikely,” Bruce replied, without bothering to look up.

“‘All relationships of a sexual nature between members of the League are expressly prohibited’--Bruce, you're planning to shove fifty of the world’s most physically voracious persons in a steel box in space, very few of whom are what you might call sexually inflexible, and you expect them to, what? Treat the place like a convent?”

“I _expect_ them,” Bruce said, enunciating crisply, “to comport themselves with the _dignity_ that--” He exhaled sharply, and then, “I expect them to behave like goddamn adults, Lantern. If they can't do that, they know where the door is.”

“The military didn't have regs this bloody severe.”

“Which is not the least of the military's problems, first of all, and secondly, the military prohibits relationships between NCOs and enlisted personnel, because they don't want to contaminate the chain of command. There is no chain of command in the League, because there are no members who are superior to the rest. That table is round for a reason, Jordan, or did you think someone on the design team just had an Arthurian fetish?”

“I don't know about that, Bats, but Superman’s abs feel pretty fuckin’ superior to me.”

Bruce rolled his eyes and returned to his laptop. “If you're fishing for a compliment, you won't find it here.”

Hal tapped the pen lightly on the desk. He didn't bother reading ahead. 

“What,” Bruce asked finally, a few minutes later, to impatient to inflect. 

“You know what this means. You know what you're saying, with this policy.”

“Yes.”

“You're saying, hide. Always hide. You're saying, never tell anyone who you are, not without the excuse of impossible extenuating circumstances. You're saying,” and Hal broke off. His knuckles were white around the pen, and there was a tremble in his hands that felt like rage. “You're saying never take off your mask, never form a meaningful connection, never be anything other than the cape. Never be human. Never fall in love.”

“Yes.”

“Jesus Christ, Bruce, _why._ ”

“Clark and Diana.”

And he deflated. “Oh.” They all remembered what the end of _that_ relationship had been like. 

Bruce closed his laptop, and steepled his fingers on the table. “All actions have consequences. Our actions simply have greater consequences than most. I’m happy Clark has Lois now. I’m happy they're together. But if something happened to Lois tomorrow, to change that, we would have a severely impaired Superman on our hands. Lives would be lost.

"I can't do anything to stop Clark from being with Lois. All I can control, is what happens within the League.”

Hal scrubbed his forehead. His heart was a furious, panicked thing in his chest. It occurred to Hal that maybe his response to the no-fraternization rule today was more forceful than it had been the last time, because that last time, he didn't have anything to lose. 

He got up, kicking back his chair, up to the narrow slit of windows recessed four feet deep into the west-facing wall. The sky was darkening outside, the last rays of sunlight streaming golden-red through the missile-proof glass. 

“Not much of a view, is it?” he said quietly. His hands were in his pockets, to hide their continuous tremble. 

“I cope,” Bruce said just as quietly. “Jordan. What's this about?”

He laughed, eyes on the window. He could see his face reflected in the glass, rippled and translucent. “I thought I had time.”

“Time,” Bruce repeated. It was a question, but of course--too impatient to inflect. 

Hal stayed where he was. Eventually Bruce came to the window too. They stood in companionable silence. 

“Time for what,” Bruce asked. 

Hal turned to him, and Bruce did the same. He took his time. Now, at the crux of things, it seemed like he should savor all of what he had left. “Serves me right, I guess,” he said. The sun was at that perfect angle, the time photographers called the golden hour, bright and rich and pure. Bruce was unfairly good-looking by almost every human metric of appeal, but in this particular light, he was… another order of thing entirely. “Shouldn't have waited so long, but I figured, you know. If you're gonna do a thing that important, you do it _right._ ”

“Jordan,” Bruce said, but his voice was hoarse. “Time for _what._ ”

Hal stepped in closer. He dropped his eyes, let them rest on some point on Bruce's chest. If he looked into those eyes, he wasn't sure his nerve would last long enough to--

“This,” Hal replied. He leaned forward. And kissed him.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> haha i am filled with regret

It was a nothing kiss, hesitant and gentle and unassuming. Bruce was warm and still, his breath held. _Okay,_ Hal thought, _message received,_ and started to pull back, and then Bruce's hand grabbed the back of his head. His mouth parted, leather gauntlets stroking a tight line down the back of his neck, and Hal was being kissed like—like nothing else, like Bruce wanted to eat him alive, like he wanted to crawl inside Hal, like he wanted to live in that hot, open mouth. Bruce's tongue was a wicked, hungry thing, was making Hal groan on a long, slow exhale, was mapping the line of his jaw, flicking over his jugular, biting against the edge of his flight jacket’s collar. 

Hal dragged that awful, terrible mouth back to his, bit into those soft lips, tasted his mouth, kissed and kissed for what felt like an age, until he was dizzy with it, until the floor felt absent, like gravity had deserted the room. 

They pulled away to breathe, and Hal looked into those ice-blue eyes, shocked, flooded with black. 

He looked past Bruce, at the table, at the abandoned pen. 

“Yeah,” he said. He could feel Bruce's hands on him, the contact like a first-degree burn through his suit. “That's what I thought it’d be like.” And then he pushed away from Bruce, and walked back to the table, and signed at the tabs.

It was a shame, Hal thought, as the access hatch to Batman’s quarters opened, that they only had heat-sensitive sliding panels in the Hall. With the way he was feeling right now, slamming a proper door in Bruce's face would have felt pretty fucking excellent. 

So that was it. Nothing changed. The Watchtower went operational, and Hal juggled Ferris Air and the Corps and League duty as poorly as ever. He still got into pissing matches with Bruce during League meetings, because the man was absolutely fucking _infuriating,_ and he still worked with the guy in the field, and still trusted him in battle. 

Someday, Hal thought, they would probably laugh about this. Someday, he would be able to say, hey remember that time when we had that fight about your stupid bylaws, and Bruce would reply, Yes, tell me more about my stupid bylaws that have maintained team cohesion for the last fifty years, Lantern. 

Hal would roll his eyes, and Bruce would crack a faint smile, and it would be—

It would be fine. 

Someday, that would happen, but now… Now, now and then, Hal would look up, and see Bruce across a room and think, _I can't do this. I can't do this anymore._

And Bruce would look up too, as if he could feel the weight of Hal’s gaze, and look back, steadily, like he was saying, _You signed the paperwork. It's an honor thing, remember?_

And the black thing in his chest would howl, and Hal would look away, and think, _I remember I remember I—_

Somewhere in the middle of all this, Barry and Iris broke up. 

Hal was sure it made him a bad person, that he was glad about the breakup, but worrying about someone else's misery made his own misery seem less important, and that helped. It coincided with a lull in Corps assignments, which was convenient too, because Barry was Not Dealing Well with his emotions, and Hal was maybe picking up some of the slack in Central City besides JL stuff and his day job, crashing at Barry's every now and then. And maybe he was a little defensive of Barry during meetings, but what decent friend wouldn't be? The guy deserved a break. He did enough. 

Whatever it was, it had Bruce in a spectacularly foul mood—Hal caught him more than once, brooding in Barry’s direction, like he was contemplating possible avenues to best murder the Flash. Which only made Hal double-down even more in Barry’s defense, not that Barry was in any state of mind to notice. If Bruce was planning to pull a Mt. Vesuvius on the guy, he was going to have to get past Hal first. 

So of course that didn't happen. 

What happened, instead, was, Barry dragged Hal to a service stairwell off the zeta stations, after a routine conference, pretty much about to vibrate out of his own skin, and beamed at him, apparently beyond words. 

“You look chipper,” Hal commented, though it was hard not to smile in the face of all that radiant happiness. “What's up, sunshine? Did you win the lottery or—” Barry had pushed back the cowl, and Hal caught sight of a purple bruise, peeking over the folds of the suit, like Barry had had a run-in with a horny octopus… or. “Holy shit. Is that a…”

He nodded, still grinning, and said, “Iris. She's moving back in.”

“Holy shit,” Hal breathed, and gripped Barry's shoulders. “Dude, _holy shit_.”

“I _know.”_

“Aw, dude, I’m so fucking happy for you,” and there was a hug that went on for too long, but the upswell of warmth in his chest could not be contained, he couldn't stop smiling like an idiot. They pulled away. Hal took another look at that hickey and whistled. “Go Iris.”

Barry turned redder than his suit. Such a girl, honestly. Hal really had to stop looking at that goddamn hickey. It was just… shocking. Iris had always seemed like a firecracker, and of course Barry was the Flash, and of course, their sex life had to be some kind of spectacular, but he hadn't actually ever been presented with physical evidence of it—they must have fucked just before the meeting, for that bruise to still be so fresh, with Barry's accelerated healing factor. She must have bit to the blood, must’ve been goddamn out of her mind, must have been so wet, so gone, so hungry for it—

“Hey…” Barry said quietly. Those blue eyes were watching him, and Hal felt shame hit him like a goddamn renegade freighter. Jesus, what the hell kind of a guy fantasized about his best friend's _wife_? “So it occurs to me,” Barry said, “that I haven't really been a very good friend to me, these past few weeks.” 

Oh _god._

“What?” Hal blinked. “ _No,_ Barry, what the hell? You’ve been— It's not—”

“Shut up,” Barry said, but gently. “You ever gonna tell me what’s going on with you and Bruce?”

“What's going on. Nothing's going on.”

“That's the problem, is it?” Barry asked shrewdly. Fucking forensic scientists with their fucking PhDs and their too-fucking-sharp eyes. 

“Barry…” Hal said, and his voice was hoarse, rough, and that's when he felt Barry tense, felt his eyes leave Hal and find a point behind him.

He turned to—speak of the goddamn devil—to find _Batman_ , glaring at them both. 

“Lantern,” the Bat growled. “A word.” And with that, he turned on a heel, stalked off down the corridor, clearly with the expectation that he would be followed. 

Well fuck that, a part of him said, and fuck Bruce too, the entitled jackass. Hal was done following people. He had taken enough orders in the Force, took ‘em still at the Corps, he didn't need this shit infecting the League, didn't—

He followed. 

Because the other part of him wanted the very _in-person_ pleasure of punching Batman in the face. 

But when Hal strode into Bruce's quarters…

He was quiet, was the thing. His cowl was off, and the cape had been discarded too, slung over the back of a chair, careless. He had his back to Hal, standing in front of the long, thin wall-length panel of transparisteel, and starlight silhouetted him, traced the long, gorgeous lines of his body, the breadth of his shoulders, the sharp narrowing of his waist, the bulge of his thighs, the definition of his arms. 

Hal felt his throat go dry. 

“You wanted to talk,” he forced himself to say. “Talk.”

“Are you fucking him,” was what Bruce said, that son of a bitch. 

“ _That's_ what this is about?”

Bruce turned. The light was behind him. Hal couldn't make his face out at all. “So you are.”

“It's not exactly your goddamn business, is it?”

“You signed that contr—”

“You know, I picked up a little contract law, in college,” Hal interrupted idly. His heart was thundering. He looked at his nails. “Technically, any agreement that is unenforceable in a court of law is not, actually, a contract. So you take that worthless piece of paper and shove it up your asshole, you self-righteous bastard, if there's room beside the goddamn baseball bat you have up there, and you _choke_ on—”

The Watchtower was a marvel of twenty-first century engineering, but a clubhouse in the exosphere did have to make allowances for space. As a result, none of their personal quarters were particularly large, it took Bruce all of three long strides to cover the distance between them and slam Hal into the wall behind him, knocking the air out of his lungs. 

Hal still had his ring on, but using it here, now, felt like an admission of defeat--Hal struggled against that hard, solid body that had him pinned instead, the thighs bracketing his, the arm on his chest like iron rebar, the hand that had somehow pinned both his wrists behind his back. 

“Are. You. _Fucking._ Him.” Each word was hissed against his ear, hot with anger, and it sparked something in gut, a throb of want, coiling and spitting. The room felt like it was spinning away. There was some heavy pressure against his groin; it took Hal a second to realize it was the cup in the Batsuit, that he was getting harder, stiffening in the his, rubbing slowly against that hard bulge. 

“ ** _You_** didn't _want_ to,” Hal snarled back. Bruce thought he was the only one who got to be angry about this? Bruce thought he was the only one who hurt? Screw him. “So I got someone _else_ who _did,_ so **_what_** —”

“You think I don't _want to?”_ So Batman _could_ inflect, apparently. It just took extraordinary circumstances. 

“Do you,” Hal asked, and he could barely recognize his own voice right now, it was so wrecked. “Show me, then, show me what you want—”

There was a hand coming to touch his jaw, the pressure on his chest easing. The hand clamping his wrists released, curled around the small of his back. Bruce's mouth nudged his, and Hal titled just the right way, and Bruce shuddered, with his whole body, and then he was kissing Hal, kissing him with aching hunger, licked his mouth open, dove in, like he was searching for something, some sharp undefinable thing, and he was clutching his hands in Hal’s ass, was devouring his mouth, biting so hard it should have hurt, except for how it made white sparks explode behind his eyelids, for how it wrenched terrible sounds out of Hal’s throat. 

Bruce pulled away, breath coming harshly. “Seen enough?” he asked, and it took a moment for the words to click. 

“Bruce,” Hal said, but it came out sharper than he had intended. 

“Don't _ever,”_ Bruce snarled, “ _ever_ make the mistake of thinking I don't want you.”

And Bruce tore away from him, strode out of the room, while Hal was still trying to catch his breath, still trying to form a word. a word like, _stay_ , or _please_ , or sorry, or _I lov—_

He slammed his fist backwards, crashing it into the wall. “Fuck.”

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! hit kudos if you liked it, and remember to subcribe for updates <3  
> title from ben howard's 'promise'


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